Messynotes CLI

This is a CLI to facilitate using Hugo as a personal notes/TODO system via the messynotes hugo theme. The basic idea is to use the hugo server to serve the content locally and reload on change as you go.

This is a scratch-an-itch project out of my frustration with other tools. I want:

markdown
my own git repo (no cloud storage)
my own text editor
one tool/UI to keep up with notes and my TODO list
do everything but view from my terminal
no electron, or dependency on a particular editor (like VSCode)

Features

This CLI wraps hugo + the theme for easy notes a TODO management. It does things such as:

Revision control your markdown-based notes with git.
Use your editor of choice vs an incomplete baked-in editor.
Use Hugo to render-on-save.
Let you initialize a new repository with the theme and a skeleton layout
Create and edit notes easily without having to cd to your repo
Proxy use of git inspired by chezmoi, which I use and love.
Run the Hugo server in the background
Pull up said hugo server in your browser.
Generate PDF files of a given note via headless chrome to preserve all the Hugo formatting. Works with the theme to make docs not include navigation, etc.

Planned

super basic bookmark management support using Hugo "data"

Theme

You can see the example theme and the README for it for details.

Installing/Building

I haven't created any releases yet. I'm still test driving myself before I do so.

You can clone the repo and run make to build the binary.

make install will install to ~/bin by default and stick the shell completion for zsh into ~/.zsh_functions. You can override those locations by setting BINDIR and SHELLCOMPDIR but it's probably easier to just install yourself if you don't want that setup.

I personally alias this to just notes and zsh handles the completion voodoo. I didn't want to actually name the binary that because there are likely 100 notes commands out there.

Usage

If you run messynotes init, it will create the scaffolding for a project and prompt you to save the configuration for it.

You probably want to have at least a ~/.messynotes.yaml config file setting the root directory of your hugo repo. That makes it so you don't have to cd to that every time.

Every top-level option can go in the config file. You can also run messynotes showConfig for a human-readable view of what it's actually using, or messynotes showConfig -y to output the YAML that would be a full config file.

Base Example:

root: /home/mike/src/notes

This is the high-level usage. All functionality requires the use of the subcommands listed.

The messynotes hugo theme is designed to be a minimalistic
system for maintaining personal notes and todo items.

This is a wrapper cli for providing simple access to maintain and use it
in this fashion.

This will try its best to choose the text editor of your choice.  The order
of precidence (first set wins): command line argument, config file,
$VISUAL, $EDITOR, editor command (for update-alternatives), and vi.  If
none are found, commands like 'new' will fail and you will need to
specify in the config or on the command line.

For the browser it will walk command line argument, config file, the 'open'
command, and then the 'xdg-open' command.  If none work, it will fail.

Usage:
  messynotes [command]

Available Commands:
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  contentDir  Prints the directory with markdown notes to stdout
  edit        Edit an existing note
  editConfig  Edit configuration file
  git         Run git commands within the repo
  help        Help about any command
  init        Initialize new site/repository
  new         Create a new note
  open        Open a web browser to the hugo url (http://localhost:1313)
  pdf         Create a PDF from an existing note
  restart     Restart hugo server
  showConfig  display configuration specified or implied
  start       Run the hugo server and open the browser to it.
  stop        Stop hugo server
  todo        Edit TODO file
  update      Update theme

Flags:
  -b, --browser string   Web browser binary/launcher
      --config string    config file (default $HOME/.messynotes.yaml)
  -e, --editor string    Text editor binary
  -g, --git string       Git binary (default "git")
  -h, --help             help for messynotes
  -H, --hugo string      Hugo binary (default "hugo")
  -r, --root string      Root of hugo repository (default ".")

Use "messynotes [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Contributing

PRs will get the highest priority, either fixing bugs or extending features. Issues that are bug reports will be next because they will bother me. Feature ask issues will be an "if I can get around to it."

I have a real job and a family and can't dedicate a lot of time to this. It's useful to me. It may be to you.

LICENSE

This is under the MIT License.

mmessmore/messynotes